The Month Prices Doubled Every Fifteen Hours
A pengő held at breakfast was worth less than a third of itself by bedtime, and that was a normal day in July 1946.
In July 1946, Hungary recorded a monthly inflation rate of 41,900,000,000,000,000 percent. That is 4.19 followed by sixteen zeroes — the highest ever measured anywhere. Daily inflation that month ran at 207 percent, which means prices doubled about every fifteen hours. A wage paid at breakfast was worth less than a third of itself by bedtime.
The currency had given up on counting. By mid-1946 the central bank was printing notes denominated in the B-pengő, where one B-pengő equaled one trillion ordinary pengő. The largest note ever issued — a 100 million B-pengő bill, or 10 to the 20th — was printed but never circulated. When it left the press, it was worth about twenty US cents.
Finance minister Ferenc Gordon tried a workaround called the adópengő, a tax-pengő indexed daily so the government could at least collect revenue in something that wasn't melting in your pocket. It bought the budget a few weeks. Then it inflated too.
On August 1, 1946, Hungary scrapped the pengő and introduced the forint. The exchange rate was 400 octillion to one — a 4 with twenty-nine zeroes after it. The wartime pengő stock, accumulated across years of German occupation and Soviet liberation, was wiped out in a single legal stroke. People burned the leftover notes for warmth. Weimar Germany's famous 1923 inflation was, by comparison, a rounding error.
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